Luke Turner

I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. My fascination with uncontroversial classics – The Great Escape, Band of Brothers, Master and Commander – began to feel illicit, itchy, for reasons that seemed far less noble than my emerging anti-war politics. Things came to a head when my brother and I borrowed Das Boot from our local library. He went to bed early, bored by hours of sweaty submarine misery. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. More immediately, I was aware that the allure these characters had for many of the men in my life was due to the fact that they weren’t allowed to transgress the bounds of heterosexuality. As an adult historian of war and queerness, I came to understand better the tension between popular war narratives and the ones I sensed below the surface as a teenager: they tell seemingly contradictory stories about what it means to be a man.

In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence. He recalls being afraid to glue pilot figurines into his AirFix Spitfires out of a ‘moral anxiety’ that they might turn into flesh-and-blood men. During a battlefield tour school trip, he experienced the agony of sleeping in a bunk just feet away from his teenage crush, hoping for contact while surrounded by a history that fascinated him. For a queer kid growing up under Section 28 and a new wave of Second World War mythologisation, history was a fraught country for self-exploration. ‘For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes.’

It’s this apparent contradiction that drives Men at War, a part-memoir, part-historical exploration of British Second World War masculinity. Turner uses his own cultural memory of the war – from his grandfather’s religiously motivated conscientious objection, to a childhood fascination with planes – as signposts for a deeper enquiry into the lives and sexualities of perhaps the most celebrated generation of British men. Intended as a broad challenge to notions of ‘real’ British manhood, Turner’s focus on queer life stories, from the bisexual commando-turned-writer Michael Burn, to the transgender Spitfire pilot Roberta Cowell, allows him to connect themes rarely considered together in scholarship on the World Wars. Despite the richness of British masculinity studies and the pervasiveness of queer First World War poetry in British school curricula, Emma Vickers’ 2013 Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45 remains one of the few academic monographs to consider queer men not just as a given in British histories of war, but as a distinct culture enabled by wartime mobilisation.

Read the rest at HistoryToday.com.

Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History.… (more)

He was beginning to think that his relationship with Alice was the one but all too soon it unravelled. Left alone, the thoughts in his head that had affected him since childhood began to return. Depression, guilt, religious confusion, abuse and the conflicts of his bi-sexuality, they were back again. This time he had a place of refuge where he could go to, Epping Forest. It was a place that would draw him back time after time.

It didn’t provide all the solace and comfort he needed though, some of that he would find in the arms of men and women after his relationship finished. Epping Forest is a place of secrets, there is obviously something about it that attracts a darker personality and it has a reputation for a place that men could go to find partners, especially when homosexuality was illegal. However, rather than finding demons in the woods, Turner used that time spent in the natural world to excise his own and it gives him the inspiration to begin to investigate a family secret from a few generations ago.

The ancient timbers of Greensted know no hypocrisy or bigotry, but are prayers carved from nature, as sacred as hymns.

The blurb describes this as an original book, and throughout a lot of the book, I’d be tempted to agree. Turner writes with a wonderful eye for detail and even though this is a very raw, honest and open memoir you do have to be broadminded for this. He asks searching questions of himself about his sexuality and how society treats those that do not fit conventional stereotypes. But the understorey of his memoir is the forest, how it lifts his mood when he visits, so much so that he ends up volunteering there. It is a great companion to Strange Labyrinth which is Will Ashon’s take on the same place and shows how people can have a deep attachment in a very different way to a place.… (more)